Birds in grass

Just a little pen drawing in sketchbook, half an A4 page. There's an idea behind it which I don't want to put into words yet, might scare it away.  

Crowded drawing No. 2

Page 12, graphite, ink, pen, collage

This is another crowded drawing like the one in an earlier post (which I've renamed). The idea of crowding a page with many unrelated elements came from a book and when I tried it out I liked the way the bits started to relate to each other in unexpected ways. And it forces one away from the figure-ground mindset. It'a another of those handy tools for the mental toolkit, something that could help to break through a block for instance. This one, a piece here and a piece there over several days from magazines, newspaper and the internet, seems to me not as good as the first, it's become a little self-conscious and heavy and the pieces hardly relate at all. But the individual pieces I like. I'm working on another and will post it when done.

Two drawings

A roll-up pencil holder

The first drawing is of a canvas roll-up pencil holder that I got in a sale. It's similar to a brush holder, and like a brush holder it's open at the top which allows things to fall out, though generally they don't. Unrolled, it has a row of loops for keeping in place pencils, pens, graphite sticks etc, and a couple of bigger loops for things like a sharpener or eraser, plus there's a safety flap at the "lower" end. It doesn't sound as if it would be effective but I really like having my drawing things in there and prefer it to a box. The finishing is nice but not flexible, there's only one size/position where it rolls up tight enough so that the snap fastener keeps everything inside.

Layered abstract drawing, crayon and acrylic on paper, A4

The next drawing is very different. It was done with alternating layers of crayon and acrylic paint. I had forgotten it and found it yesterday when going through the work done for the course. This is a nice kind of thing to do if one's mind feels particularly blank, one can keep going indefinitely, adding layers that conceal or partly conceal the marks underneath.

Missing comments

Thanks to a friend who alerted me this morning to the fact that some comments she had posted had never appeared. On checking into it, I found a whole load of comments "awaiting moderation", going back to at least May 2010, possibly earlier. I would like to apologise sincerely to all those whose comments didn't appear or who might have thought I was ignoring them, I assure you that could never be the case. In fact I was a little sad at the lack of comments but felt, hey, that's the way it is in the blogosphere, mustn't let it get me down!

How it happened, as best I can figure. I never had comment moderation on before because comments were few and I got an email immediately so I could always delete any objectionable ones manually. Then someone started posting malicious stuff about someone who was mentioned in a post so I turned comment moderation on, and went about my business, thinking I'd continue to get email notifications. But it seems that turning moderation on has the effect of turning email notifications off and I didn't realize that. It's taken a while and I might never have known if Lynx hadn't alerted me. It's fixed now and once again my apologies to those whose comments have taken so long to appear.